“If you only did the things you don’t want to do, you’d have everything you want.” – Mel Robbins , Stop Saying You’re Fine

First, I want to thank everyone who sent me their lovely birthday greetings and good wishes on my birthday last Friday! I thoroughly enjoyed celebrating at The Happiest Place on Earth (AKA Disneyland) with my wonderful husband, Rick. The weather was perfect and we even manifested an unusually small crowd for a summer day.

Because of my birthday and preparing my upcoming six-session “Prosperity Summer Camp”webinar to teach you step-by-step exactly how to create ANYTHING you want using the Law of Attraction, I did not have time to prepare an original blog for today.

However, because I needed some valuable material to share with you, the Law of Attraction (which says “energy attracts like energy”) guided me quickly and easily to a great post by WalktheTalk.com (which I have permission to reprint) about an important topic that has come up a lot lately among my coaching clients: How do you prioritize the many tasks and goals competing for your time to ensure you will accomplish the ones that really matter MOST to you?

The answer follows! I hope you will find it as helpful as I did.

“Mark Twain once said that if the first thing you do each morning is eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long. In Eat That Frog, author Brian Tracy says that your ‘frog’ should be the most difficult item on your to-do list because, if you eat that first, it’ll give you energy and momentum for the rest of the day. But if you let the frog sit there on the plate and stare at it while you do a hundred unimportant things, it can drain your energy and you won’t even know it. Your ability to select the most important task at the moment and get it done will have more of an impact on your success than any other quality or skill.” – WalktheTalk.com

“Apply the 80/20 Rule to Everything” from the book Eat That Frog! By Brian Tracy

“The 80/20 Rule is one of the most helpful of all concepts of time and life management. It is also called the ‘Pareto Principle’ after its founder, the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who first wrote about it in 1895. Pareto noticed that people in his society seemed to divide naturally into what he called the ‘vital few,’ the top 20 percent in terms of money and influence, and the ‘trivial many,’ the bottom 80 percent.

He later discovered that virtually all economic activity was subject to this principle as well. For example, this principle says that 20 percent of your activities will account for 80 percent of your results, 20 percent of your customers will account for 80 percent of your sales, 20 percent of your products or services will account for 80 percent of your profits, 20 percent of your tasks will account for 80 percent of the value of what you do, and so on. This means that if you have a list of ten items to do, two of those items will turn out to be worth five or ten times more than the other eight items put together.

Number of Tasks versus Importance of Tasks

Here is an interesting discovery. Each of the ten tasks may take the same amount of time to accomplish. But one or two of those tasks will contribute five or ten times the value of any of the others.

Often, one item on a list of ten tasks that you have to do can be worth more than all the other nine items put together. This task is invariably the frog that you should eat first.

Focus on Activities, not Accomplishments

The most valuable tasks that you can do each day are often the hardest and most complex. But the payoff and rewards for completing these tasks efficiently can be tremendous. For this reason, you must adamantly refuse to work on tasks in the bottom 80 percent while you still have tasks in the top 20 percent left to be done.

Before you begin work, always ask yourself, ‘Is this task in the top 20 percent of my activities or in the bottom 80 percent?’

The hardest part of any important task is getting started on it in the first place. Once you actually begin work on a valuable task, you will be naturally motivated to continue. A part of your mind loves to be busy working on significant tasks that can really make a difference. Your job is to feed this part of your mind continually.

Motivate Yourself

Just thinking about starting and finishing an important task motivates you and helps you to overcome procrastination. Time management is really life management, personal management. It is really taking control of the sequence of events. Time management is having control over what you do next. And you are always free to choose the task that you will do next. Your ability to choose between the important and unimportant is the key determinant of your success in life and work.

Effective, productive people discipline themselves to start on the most important task that is before them. They force themselves to eat that frog, whatever it is. As a result, they accomplish vastly more than the average person and are much happier as a result. This should be your way of working as well.”

Thanks, Brian! Once again, he has proven that the most profound, impactful ideas are often the simplest! If you will just discipline yourself each day to identify and then plunge in and tackle your 20 percent most IMPORTANT tasks (also often known as “Income Producing Activities”) FIRST, you will inevitably create all the success, money, time freedom, happiness, fulfillment and self-esteem you could possibly want.

And once you realize that you really DO stand to gain ALL those goodies, then eating that ugly old frog doesn’t seem so daunting, now does it?

IMPORTANT NOTE: A Cup of Caroll is taking next week off for our USA Independence Day holiday weekend AND so that I can continue preparations for my Prosperity Summer Camp webinar. On June 19, you should have received the first email letting you know that registration is now OPEN and Early Birds who register by June 30 will qualify for two additional VALUABLE gifts! If you didn’t get it, watch for the next email about the course that comes out Monday the 26th and jump right in! The six-module Zoom course begins on Tuesday evening July 18. I promise it will be interactive, fun and create lots of new prosperity for all who join me. Your friends, family and Teammates are welcome to join the course. Please pass my emails along to them and encourage them to sign up too! (If you or they have any questions, please email me right away.)

If you or your friends would like your own free subscription to receive this blog three Sundays a month, just go to http://practicalprosperitycoach.com and click on the Prosperity Tips button at the top.

“Challenges are gifts that force us to search for a new center of gravity. Don’t fight them. Just find a different way to stand.” – Oprah Winfrey

Are you struggling with a challenge — Something that isn’t going the way you thought it would or wanted it to? Are you feeling disappointed, frustrated, defeated and wondering what YOU must have done wrong to attract such a negative result into your life?

I want to assure you that what looks like “bad news” in your life today can turn out to be “good news” in the long run. IF you maintain the right attitude in the face of a negative present, in the not-too-distant future, you will look back at your present challenge as the necessary catalyst for a result that is ultimately very GOOD for you.

My personal belief is that it’s a Divine Plan for your highest good, working itself out in ways we cannot entirely understand because we have a very limited view of the Universal Big Picture. But it is a phenomenon that I have seen too many times in my life and the lives of many, many coaching clients to believe it’s due to luck or coincidence.

The Law of Attraction says that “energy attracts like energy,” meaning that the “energy” (your thoughts plus your emotions) with which you respond to a person or circumstance will attract MORE of the same to you. It’s not what initially happens to you which determines the ultimate outcome; it’s how you respond to what happens that either keeps things snowballing in a negative direction OR halts the negativity in its tracks and begins attracting positive people, resources and serendipitous events that will work in your favor.

One of my clients recently experienced this phenomenon in a big way. In April, she and her Team of dedicated business partners had a very challenging and frustrating month in their network marketing business. Her company is expanding rapidly across the globe and wanted to install a new online platform to allow all the countries that will soon be coming on board to use the same seamlessly-integrated system to sell products, sign up new business partners and provide ongoing training, support and communications world-wide.

But, as often seems to happen in the wonderful world of computer technology, things did not go as planned during the switchover to the new system in early April. There were many frustrating glitches that prevented customers from placing orders or charged them twice, kept new consultants from signing up, or prevented them from tracking their sales numbers. It was a tangled mess that the company’s technical experts struggled for weeks to fix, as many Teams’ productivity slowed to a crawl.

Experienced Team Leaders like my client had some balanced perspective. She knew the company was ethical and believed the staff were doing their very best to make things right, and trusted that everything would ultimately work out. But many of her Team’s newer members were stymied and upset and sent frantic messages to her almost hourly, causing her emotional stress. She felt terrible for them and helpless to do anything to change the situation.

I worked closely with this Leader client to help her maintain a positive mindset, reminding her frequently that she could only do her personal best, and must let go of all feelings of guilt or concern about things she couldn’t control. She could either be a positive mindset role model for her Team, or allow their fear and negativity drag her down with them. To her great credit, she worked diligently every day to be patient, maintain her poise and keep expecting The Best outcome to emerge from this apparently very bad situation.

Near the end of the month, it was clear that the computer glitches could not be fixed anytime soon, so the company reverted to its old system and made things as fair to everyone as they could. Basically, they gave each consultant the benefit of the doubt. Thus, anyone who had entered the month of April striving for a particular sales goal would get credit for having attained it, based on their numbers from March.

What this meant for my client and her Team was very positive! In March, they had been closing in on the volume needed for April to be the first month of her three-month “Lexus Run.” This meant that if the whole Team sold a certain dollar amount of products, and maintained that level for three months in a row, my client would earn a free lease on the Lexus model of her choice. Once a Leader achieves her Lexus, every member of her Team sees the evidence that they can do it too – They are going to the TOP together!

Even though my client’s Team didn’t come anywhere close to the required sales volume in April, largely due to the computer system SNAFU, the company still gave them credit for achieving “Month One” of the three month Lexus contest. This windfall gave them all such an emotional boost after their frustrating April struggle, they sailed right past the minimum required sales number in May for a solid “Month Two” triumph. June is now my client’s third and final qualification month to earn her Lexus, and everyone on the Team is fired up and working like crazy to reach the goal that nobody doubts is going to happen.

In retrospect, my client can see that, if things had gone normally for her Team in April, it isn’t certain whether they actually would have sold the required amount to begin their “Lexus Run.” But because of her steadfast positive response to what initially looked like a very BAD situation, things turned in their favor in a BIG way.

I give all the credit to my client for maintaining her own positive energy, and being a great role model for her Team to do the same. Way to allow God/The Universe to control the “How” and turn her Bad News into Great News!

IMPORTANT NOTE:A Cup of Caroll is taking next week off so that I can begin preparing for my Prosperity Summer Camp webinar. ALL my readers who subscribe to this blog will get the first information/registration email very soon. The six-week course begins on Tuesday evening July 18. I promise you that it going to be interactive, fun and will create LOTS of new prosperity for those who join me! Your friends, family and teammates are welcome to join the course. Please pass my informational emails along to them and encourage them to sign up too!

If you or your friends would like your own free subscription to receive this blog three Sundays a month, just go to http://practicalprosperitycoach.com and click on the Prosperity Tips button at the top.

“You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select your clothes every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That’s the only thing you should be trying to control.” – Elizabeth Gilbert

When several of my coaching clients told me they were reading You Are a Bad Ass at MakingMoney by Jen Sincero and vowed that it was EVEN better than her fabulous You Are a Bad Ass, I immediately ordered a copy. I am SO glad I did!

My autographed copy arrived just in time for me to devour most of it on our long flights to and from Hawaii last month. I am urging you now: RUN, don’t walk, to get this book….IF you are interested in having more financial prosperity in your life. In fact, if you are interested in having more of ANYTHING in your life.

Really, the only thing I can come up with that doesn’t require money is LOVE. So, if we are honest, what concerns us most is how to create more MONEY in our lives because money is the foundation for having time freedom, dream homes, beautiful cars, the best educational opportunities for our kids, creative pursuits, exciting travel adventures and the ability to fully support our favorite charities and causes.

I truly have not been so impressed with a book about the Law of Attraction (which states that “energy attracts like energy”) since The Power by Rhonda Byrne years ago. Sincero’s new book is so clear, so easy to understand, and so damn FUNNY, I promise that you will turn the pages quickly and laugh out loud frequently, as I did — and then decide to go back and re-read it and do every exercise in the book.

I have been studying, teaching and striving to fully LIVE the formula for using the power of your mind and energy to create anything you want since I was first introduced to it via the network marketing industry in the mid-1990’s. They didn’t call it “The Law of Attraction” back then (credit for that goes to Rhonda Byrne and The Secret), but authors have been trying to explain how to use it to make your dreams a reality for several centuries. (Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill was one of the first, and still one of the best, modern books on this topic.)

I have gotten many useful insights and ideas from these scores of books and videos by Master Manifesters over the years, which I have put into practice in my own life. I have used The Law of Attraction to dig our family out of a deep financial hole from the Great Recession, to find the perfect car, the perfect home and the perfect husband (Yes, Rick, you ARE perfect!). I have used it to create magical vacation experiences and to survive serious threats to our financial and physical well- being. I know it is real and I know it works. Reliably, every time.

I got one very useful NEW insight about the Law of Attraction from Jen Sincero’s latest book (which is filled with jaw-dropping and often funny stories of her and her coaching clients’ triumphs at creating large amounts of money when it looked like they didn’t have a prayer of doing so) about the fact that FEAR is always going to be a factor in manifesting what you want.

If you are pursuing the HOW that is going to get you the money or item you really, really want, you have to realize that you MUST experience some discomfort or even cold sweat FEAR in order to get it. That doesn’t mean that the How contains a REAL risk to your physical well-being. It usually indicates that your Ego is terrified that you will either fail and will then be ridiculed or devastated emotionally OR that you will succeed and be overwhelmed by your new power and responsibilities or disliked by those who are jealous of your success.

The FEAR can stop you from having your greatest desire when it is right at your fingertips. You have to WANT it so much and BELIEVE that you are going to get it so deeply that you are willing to walk through all fear or discomfort and come out the other side. If you are willing to face your fear and do it anyway, you have a great shot at success.

Jen is great at telling it like it is. I love that she doesn’t sugar-coat this because I know that my own Ego and my coaching clients’ Egos have threatened to sabotage us by trying to convince us that the “risk” is REAL and we should STOP NOW in our pursuit of our Big Dreams. (These fears are called “Limiting Beliefs” for a reason!) If you follow the steps of the Law of Attraction and if your belief is stronger than your Ego’s fear, I know that it WILL work for you. Reliably, every time.

My own most recent Law of Attraction manifestation experience happened last week: While Rick and I were out delivering his monthly newsletter to each door in his real estate “farm,” I declared to God/The Universe that, “I am creating that Rick will get at least one new real estate transaction from this newsletter.” I really BELIEVED it and felt EXCITED to see how God/The Universe would make it happen. (Two musts for using the Law of Attraction to manifest what you want, according to Sincero’s book.)

The following day, which was Memorial Day, Rick and I entered a local restaurant and caught sight of our favorite server in the main dining room. We hadn’t seen “Marie” in quite a few months because she only works weekdays and we usually go there for brunch on Sunday. Also, we arrived at the end of the lunch rush, which was usually the time she went home, so it was a lovely surprise to see her still there. We asked to be seated in her section and Rick ran back to the car to get one of his newsletters, as Marie always likes to guess Rick’s monthly “trivia quiz” for a chance at a gift card.

At first, Marie frowned at the hostess, clearly indicating that she was about to end her shift and didn’t really want any new customers. But when she saw it was us, she beamed and came rushing over to our table, exclaiming, “This is a sign from the Universe that you are here!” As Rick handed her his newsletter, she told him that she has finally decided to take action on her longtime dream of selling her condo and moving to Idaho, where her retired father (and co-owner of her condo) now lives.

“I have been torn between using you or my dear friend ‘Linda’ to list my house for sale. She and I have been friends for years, but she is new to real estate and Dad is urging me to use someone more experienced. Now, here you are, and I take that as my sign it’s supposed to be YOU!”

And with that, Rick secured his next client. It was not exactly the HOW I had envisioned, but that is something Jen Sincero emphasizes we have to give up. We can’t control HOW God/The Universe chooses to fulfill our desires. Our job is to be CLEAR about what we want, to BELIEVE it will happen, and to take committed ACTION toward our goals– which inevitably means we have to walk through our fear and do it anyway!

So I have decided to step through one of my own big fears and declare this: I am offering anyone who reads my blog and their friends, colleagues and loved ones the chance to attend a virtual Law of AttractionSummer Camp that I am creating for July and August.

You send your kids to summer camp to help them stay actively engaged, learn new skills, gain confidence, have fun and make new friends. Why shouldn’t we adults use our summer to do the same AND learn exactly how to manifest anything we want – especially money!

I am offering you and your friends the chance to learn exactly how to do this, as I have been doing in my own life and teaching my coaching clients to do for many years now. We will all read You Are a Bad Ass at Making Money together during the two month course, to get the wonderful foundation in Law of Attraction principles that Jen Sincero provides. During the six one-hour classes, I will teach you even MORE practical applications of her precepts. I will share with you my very BEST tools, tips and techniques that I have used for over 20 years to “make the Law of Attraction my bitch,” as Jen Sincero would say. I will do group coaching as part of each session AND hold at least one private phone coaching session with each participant, all included in the very affordable course fee.

The scary part for me? For the first time ever, I am going to present via a Zoom webinar. (Participants who don’t want to use Zoom for free can still use the telephone to access the seminar.) Tele-seminars have been my familiar, comfortable format up to now. And learning new technology is not my strong suit….So this is uncharted territory for me. I am both scared and excited to stretch and grow my presentation and group coaching skills to make the class as engaging and participatory as possible because I want everyone to actually REACH a Big Goal they have set by the end of the two months (whether financial or otherwise).

If you want to learn to manifest your dreams more easily – reliably, every time – I hope you will join me at a Summer Camp for your wallet! Let’s support each other to put something at stake for the course, walk through our fears, and prove that we can each manifest a Big Goal by the end of summer 2017!

Stay tuned for more details about the course and how to register in a separate email that will come to you soon. I hope you will forward it to others and help me spread the word to everyone you know who wants their life to be MORE fulfilling, MORE prosperous, MORE joyful and MORE fun!

If you would like your own free subscription to receive this blog three Sundays a month, just go to my website at http://www.practicalprosperitycoach.com and click on the Prosperity Tips button at the top.

I invite you to give a friend, colleague or loved one a truly unique gift that can change their life — ONE HOUR of Personal Success Coaching. It is absolutely F*R*E*E* with no obligation and no strings attached! You can give this to as many people who will really appreciate it as you wish. (If you haven’t been in coaching with me for a while, feel free to claim it for YOURSELF, too!)

To schedule a F*R*E*E* HOUR of phone coaching that will help them clarify their Big Goals and get into ACTION to make this their BEST year yet, have them contact me at caroll@practicalprosperitycoach.com or toll free 888-503-8145 to schedule their session.